Extra, Extra, Read All About It!
Are you old enough to remember when hardcopy newspapers came to your house? I remember opening the front door and dancing on bare feet to pick up the morning paper. If you aren't old enough, check out one of those old black-and-white movies: you'll see the boys holding up the latest edition and yelling, 'Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Mayor caught in sex scandal!'
Back in the day, the family often divided the paper, which came in sections. Mom wanted the Lifestyle section, Dad the sports, and most kids the comics. Me, I read the satire columns first. Those guys were my heroes, can you tell?
The h2g2 Post is named after those old newspapers. Something for everybody in the virtual pages.
The other week I collected some random h2g2er views of the h2g2 Post. After I got over being outraged, I started thinking: why would someone say they thought the Post was 'an arts journal with pictures'? Someone else thought we were a humour magazine – without the humour. (You were expecting maybe Monty Python?) Then it occurred to me: maybe they can't find the sport section.
Skankyrich it was what started it. He was an innovative Post Editor. 'Stop dividing it up into Features, and News, and such,' he demanded. 'That's so last millennium.' We've been using creative headers ever since. (Okay, maybe we only imagine they're creative. Leave us some illusions.)
Just for one week, we've decided to make the point: the h2g2 Post is a Newspaper. Without the paper. We have NEWS. We have ENTERTAINMENT. We have OP-ED Features. We also have humour, satire, educational features, and essays. Okay, maybe the comics section is a big large, but in the US, at least, that never hurts circulation.
In the NEWS section: Pastey starts the ball rolling in a new feature they're calling View from the Towers. I'm not sure what tower he's in, but since Pastey's planning on seeing the Grand Canyon this year, he's probably getting used to heights. View is a NEWS feature to let us in on the inside workings of our h2g2. In this case, Pastey's going to tell us about upcoming developments on the tech front. Very welcome, that.
A word about last week: we were probably more flippant than most publications on 1 April. After all, you'd never catch the BBC running bogus film reviews or fake stories about dinosaur skeletons, right? We understand the Stuttgart papers claimed the Pope was coming, but we all know how frivolous those German newspapers are. Anyway, we're back to serious – as serious as we get. We promise the info is as real as our so-called real life gets.
So enjoy reading. And send in your Stuff for the April Create travel challenge.
STOP PRESS NEWS; You've probably all heard this by now, but just in case: A consortium of prestigious libraries, including the British Library, have chosen a list of 100 websites to archive to show the future what this space/time was doing. Guess who's on that list? We are. Our pride knows no bounds. 'Mostly harmless', indeed. You know what this means, don't you? In 500 years, some poor schoolchild will be puzzling over the Post and writing a paper about how Britons lived on £53 a month.
Dmitri Gheorgheni
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